Russel if Either of You Two Degenerates Go Near Noodles Neck With Scissors Again Ill Kill You

Vol. 43 No. 21 · 4 November 2021

Jenny Turner

Hannah Arendt

by  Samantha Rose Hill.
Reaktion, 232 pp., £11.99, August, 978 1 78914 379 9

In summer​ last year, Lyndsey Stonebridge, professor of humanities and man rights at the University of Birmingham, posted a selfie on Twitter modelling her new Hannah Arendt face mask:

Prepare
for the worst:
await the best:
and
have what comes

'Non a Hannah Arendt quote! :/' Samantha Rose Hill, then the assistant managing director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College in New York State, tweeted back, across the hours and the Atlantic Ocean. 'I know! 'Twas sweet gift,' Stonebridge replied, then added: 'We should make our own.'

'One doesn't e'er have to speak,' Hill suggested – a real Arendt quote, from the long television interview she did in the 1960s with Günter Gaus, and 1 of the many Colina keeps in rotation on her Twitter feed, along with 'Writing is an integral role of the process of understanding' and 'Speaking is also a form of action' and 'Evil comes from a failure to think.' She too posts pictures of the contents of Arendt's library – 'all the old friends … Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, Rilke', in the words of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt's one-time student and first biographer – as well as her manuscripts, typed then scribbled on and sometimes cutting upwards and stuck back together: 'Ane tin nigh see [her] … with enormous silver scissors and a scroll of Scotch tape in her mitt, making an image as much as a text, alive with want for agreement,' Hill writes in her new biography.

I likewise accept merch with the dodgy quote on it – a ceramic tile not a confront mask, and 'twas gift from my sis-in-law, working in league with my teenage son – and I also have tweeted an image that links me to Hannah Arendt. In Aberdeen in May 1974, Arendt had her picture show taken forth with her groovy friend Mary McCarthy less than a mile away from where I would have been sitting at that very moment in school. What on earth were those two doing in Scotland? Well, Arendt had been delivering the second part of the Gifford Lectures, which she would write upwardly every bit her final, unfinished work,The Life of the Mind, when she had a eye attack walking to the podium. McCarthy rushed over from Paris to aid, and then was joined from New York by Lotte Köhler, Arendt's longtime assistant. The following year McCarthy and Köhler were appointed articulation executors afterward Arendt suffered a 2nd heart assault and died in her Riverside Drive flat.

'The Arendt cult is a riddle,' Walter Laqueur sighed in the 1990s, as Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire had sighed before him. So much reverent attention for someone and so 'devoid of originality, depth and a systematic character'. Was it because women similar reading other women, Laqueur wondered, and was this the reason Arendt herself, 'a highly emotional person with a stiff inclination towards impressionistic, romantic and fifty-fifty metaphysical influences' admired the '2d-rate' Rosa Luxemburg? It's probably true, as far as it goes, that increasing awareness amongst scholars of feminist citational practice has something to practise with the current prominence of both. Yes, women do like reading other women, and seeing them properly recognised for their piece of work.

But it's besides, David Runciman reckons on hisTalking Politics podcast, to do with the eventfulness of Arendt's life, which is why Ken Krimstein's comic-book biography of 2018 is structured around our heroine's 'Iii Escapes'. Arendt did not arrive in the USuntil 1941, past which time she had been on the run from Nazis of one sort or some other for many years. The first escape – in the 1920s, when Arendt was a teenager – was from a predatory, shortly-to-turn-Nazi lover; the second, in the 1930s, was from a Gestapo cell in Berlin. The 3rd was from the Gurs internment campsite in France just before the Germans took it over and started sending its inmates due east; Arendt was 1 of simply a handful of prisoners to grab at the chance offered by the French surrender to walk away 'with only a toothbrush', to spend the residue of their lives with the knowledge of what had happened to those who had not. I irony of the merch quote is that taking 'what comes' is simply what Arendt didn't practise. Friends saw her as 'a person overinclined to embrace conspiracy theories', Young-Bruehl reports, although the friends who listened were often glad they had. 'It is in the very nature of things human being that … in one case a specific crime has appeared for the get-go time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever take been,' Arendt wrote in the epilogue toEichmann in Jerusalem (1963). The destructive potential of postwar technological developments might still make what Hitler did 'wait like an evil child's fumbling toys'.

A prophetess, then, a high-class soothsayer? Information technology's true that Arendt quotes, fromThe Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in particular, were conspicuous in the cheese dreams of the U.s. media during the Trump presidency. Was it or wasn't it totalitarian? Was he or wasn't he a fascist? Hither's some other nice Arendt quote: 'No affair how much we may be capable of learning from the past it will not enable us to know the future.' And then there we are. In whatsoever example, no, Trump was non totalitarian, equally Rebecca Panovka pointed out recently inHarper's: 1 clue being in the morpheme 'total'. 'Trump never made the defining totalitarian effort to curve reality to his fictional world.' 'Alternative facts', though, and their stitching together into alternative realities: it didn't kickoff with Trump, equally Panovka shows. One reason Trump'due south lies were so successful was that he was able to exploit a lack of public trust already axiomatic when Arendt was writing her essays 'Truth and Politics' (1967) – 'No one, as far as I know, has always counted truthfulness amidst the political virtues' – and 'Lying in Politics' (1971), about the Pentagon Papers and the culling reality they presented of the war in Vietnam.

Arendt'due south American essays are widely read and debated, but a lot of her ideas about the Usa were odd. She didn't go in that location until she was in her mid-thirties, and when she did, spent most of her time with other German language émigré intellectuals (one reason so many Jewish Americans found her Eichmann reporting and then offensive was considering of its unconcealed German-Jewish snootiness towards Jews from other places) and Americans who, wherever their families had come up from, had long since fabricated themselves over every bit aristocrats of the left.On Revolution (1963), for example, stages a peculiar see between the French Revolution – a bad thing because it let 'the existence of poverty' inspire it, bulldoze it onward, 'and eventually [send] it to its doom' – and the American, which went well because the Founding Fathers refused to let the 'abject and degrading misery … present everywhere in the class of slavery and Negro labour' distract them from drafting the constitution. Arendt'southward lifelong endeavour to go on 'the social question' out of politics reached an apogee with 'Reflections on Niggling Stone' (1959), in which the Lady Arrogant – as enemies sometimes chosen her – took ane look at the famous flick of Elizabeth Eckford, the alone Black girl on her way into school beingness yelled at by a line of hate-filled whites, and decided that the most of import thing going on in it was what information technology said about negligent Black parents and 'the every bit absent-minded representatives of the NAACP': 'Have we now come to the point where information technology is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?'

As late as the 1970s, academic colleagues considered Arendt 'a announcer, not a philosopher', a midcult Mitteleuropean media performer, an intellectually more respectable version of Ayn Rand. Information technology'due south absolutely true that much of Arendt'due south best-known writing was done for magazines, not academic journals, and much 'Englished', as she called the vigorous polishings to which her work was submitted by editors and friends: and it'southward certainly strange to expect upwards her Eichmann reports in theNew Yorker and observe this mighty 'obligation I owe my past' – as she called information technology – surrounded by ads for Super Masque, Cartier diamond hairclips, the Tomlinson chair (cushioned in Fortrel polyester fibre-fill up and covered in Celaperm acetate sealed-in colour), the RCA Victor New Vista Color Boob tube. Just there'due south worse than foreign and worse than writing for theNew Yorker. 'For twelve years the peace necessary to do intellectual work is something I've known only from hearsay,' she wrote to her mentor Karl Jaspers in 1945, afterwards years in which each of them had believed the other dead. 'I've go a kind of freelance writer, something between a historian and a political announcer.' She had published her showtimePartisan Reviewpiece – nigh Kafka – the twelvemonth before.

Did she even care that much whether her work made a splash, or whether the splash was for the adept or the bad? 'Her all-time-known writings were essentially in-looking,' the political theorist Margaret Canovan explained in 1992. 'The motive backside her work was her own endeavour to understand … Misreadings of her books left her largely unmoved.' For Canovan – who wrote 2 separate Arendt books eighteen years apart, with two quite different accounts of what she was about – the mode Arendt sliced and shaped her 'thought-trains' was not random or devil-may-care exactly, just neither was information technology as laboriously intentional equally it is for many writers. Her books are best read, Canovan thinks, as 'part of the deposit laid down by her countless process of reflection and writing … like islands out of a partly submerged continent of thought'. Even in the most famous, obviously well-made Arendt books, central arguments are obscured by noodles and doodles: 'What her piece of work most resembles is some medieval manuscript on the pages of which dragons and griffins climb in and out of the messages, and leaves and tendrils twine near the words: a marvellous work of art, wonderfully bejewelled, simply in which the text is "illuminated" in a fashion that is liable to distract attention.'

'I've read your book, absorbed, for the past ii weeks, in the bathtub, riding in the auto,' McCarthy wrote to Arendt in 1951, on readingThe Origins of Totalitarianism, which had only come out. The McCarthy-Arendt correspondence quickly adult, via lunches, 'parrot talk about politics, sex, Norman Mailer', an exchange of gifts (a silk scarf, a Pottery Barn casserole), into an extraordinarily rich friendship. When friends and foes alike turned on Arendt's Eichmann book, it was McCarthy who leaped in to defend her: 'I freely confess that … I too heard … a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the terminal chorus ofFigaro or theMessiah.' Information technology was McCarthy, too, who endedThe Group, her bestselling proto-feminist romp of 1963, with the charismatic Lakey driving her stocky German baroness off into the sunset, the rest of the girls fretting that 'Lakey, who had always been frightening and superior, would now expect downwards on them for not being Lesbians.'

And it was McCarthy, finally, who was left to organise and English what there was of Arendt's last book later on her death. 'She chafed against our language and its awesome, mysterious constraints,' McCarthy wrote in an afterword, 'though she had a natural gift, which would have made itself felt in Sioux or Sanskrit, for eloquent, forceful, sometimes pungent expression.' 'The Banality of Evil,' for example, the dirge-similar subtitle the Eichmann report was given on publication, is a powerful phrase that illuminates much about the way lies, carelessness, technology and logistics combine in certain individuals and organisations to 'wreak more than havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perchance, are inherent in man'. But that phrase on the comprehend of a book well-nigh the Holocaust in the early 1960s? Maybe not the best manner to arm-twist a calm and reasoned response.

'The banality of evil' is not the only flashy phrase in the Eichmann book, ane problem with which is the style information technology combines sober, deadly serious reporting with a weirdly aerated streak of satire: the accused in the dock similar aSpitting Image boob, with his 'scraggy' neck and ill-plumbing equipment dentures; the 'sheer comedy' of the courtroom interpreters, translating from German language into Hebrew and back into much worse German; the 'heroic fight' in which the accused seemed locked with the German linguistic communication, 'which invariably defeats him'; the hideous hilarity of hearing him use phrases such as 'similar pulling teeth', virtually the struggle to go people to do what they were told, and 'Kadavergehorsam, obedience of corpses', when they did. McCarthy quickly regretted her line nearly Mozart and Handel, but Arendt secretly thought she had a point: 'You were the merely reader to understand what otherwise I have never admitted – namely that I wrote this book in a curious land of euphoria.' 'Irony,' Hill comments, 'allows for distance and reveals logical absurdity with a sense of humour.' 'Like so many who write ironically,' Young-Bruehl says, 'she was at her most cutting when most intensely involved.'

'Cura posterior', Arendt chosen her coverage of the Eichmann trial. 'Ever since,' she confessed to McCarthy, 'I feel – after twenty years – calorie-free-hearted about the whole affair. Don't tell anybody, is it non proof positive that I have no "soul"?' She'd left it backside, maybe, in the Berlin library, or the Gurs internment military camp, or on the ship crossing the Atlantic, reading out the notes she'd been given past Walter Benjamin to the huddled masses on the deck. 'Feelings of being alien, homeless and alone characterised her existence,' Köhler wrote about Arendt in America. The simply person she always felt spoke 'the same language' was her second married man, Heinrich Blücher, to whom she remained devoted upwardly to and perhaps beyond his death in 1970.

'Even Constance could see that, in some real sense, the Rosenbaums' lives were over,' the poet Randall Jarrell – a close friend and frequent Englisher – wrote in his novelPictures from an Institution (1954), in which Constance is taken to exist an authorial stand-in, with Gottfried and Irene Rosenbaum as Blücher and Arendt. 'His automated acceptance of everybody,' the novel says of Gottfried, 'was a judgment of flesh crueller, perhaps, than … impatient rejection … The thought of how he had caused these expectations was a disagreeable i.' Irene, on the other hand, Jarrell depicts as 'disinterested, just … also rather uninterested'. She spends whole days simply sitting, 'looking silently, seeing nothing except what she did not see'.

Thinking is what Arendt probably claimed to have been spending whole days doing: 'the two in 1', 'the soundless dialogue … between me and myself'. She would be thinking, and she would be smoking; activities, every bit A.O. Scott remarked in his review of Margarethe von Trotta's 2012 biopic, that from the exterior look much the same. At that place is something very Kant-similar, I used to think, most smoking, the analytics and architectonics you build when you inhale, exhale, yet all of information technology ultimately springing from a single betoken; and smoking tin can exist so useful for women and especially for women writers, sharpening your focus, giving you lot a smokescreen, acting as a repellent to continue the buzzing pests away.

Arendt liked smoking while giving lectures, McCarthy noted, 'when the burn laws permitted', and McCarthy and Köhler, Young-Bruehl reports, were both impressed by her 'recalcitrance' as a patient in Aberdeen Royal Hospital. 'She took upwardly her cigarettes as soon as the oxygen tent was removed from her room, refused to eat sensibly or cut down on her daily java intake and mustered an irritated blowing which thwarted all efforts to keep her calm.' The movie Colina has called for the cover of her book is lovely, a classic from the 1930s: you tin easily miss the cigarette and the large glass ashtray at the bottom right. Simply you won't in a more revealing picture from the same session, taken a infinitesimal before or afterwards, which Colina has put inside. The optics take bags, the face is puffy, the easily are wringing, nigh, and the cigarette is in the mouth, being sucked. The ashtray already has stubs in information technology. There'due south something that looks like a Rizla parcel on the tabletop nearby.

Hannah​ arendt was born in Hanover in 1906, the cherished just child of highly educated, non-religious Jewish parents. Her father, Paul, was an electric engineer with an astonishing home library – she first read Kant, Arendt told Gaus, at fourteen. The Arendts were socialist beau-travellers, Hannah's female parent, Martha, in particular. The 'impressionistic, romantic' admiration of Luxemburg may have begun when Martha took her to a meeting virtually the Spartacist uprising in 1919.

In 1909 or 1910, when Hannah was three, her family unit moved back to Königsberg, where both parents had grown up, as Paul was progressively weakened by the syphilis that killed him in 1913. Hannah did not accept to the widower her female parent married in 1920, or to his slightly older daughters, and in 1922 was expelled from Gymnasium for organising a boycott of a teacher she disliked. She finished her Abitur in Berlin.

'I tin can but say that I ever knew I would study philosophy,' she said in the Gaus interview. 'For me, the question was somehow: I can either written report philosophy or I can drown myself, and then to speak.' She started hearing a 'rumour' about a vivid young teacher at the academy in Marburg: 'Thinking has come to life over again; the cultural treasures of the by, believed to exist dead, are being made to speak.' And and then she went to Marburg and enrolled in 2 of Heidegger's classes, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy and a seminar on Plato'sSophist: 'For manifestly you have long been aware of what you hateful when you use the expression "being". We, still, who used to think we understood information technology, have at present become perplexed.' Arendt and Heidegger – a bright young woman of eighteen and a charismatic, married professor twice her age – began a sexual relationship then tried to end it, with Arendt leaving Marburg start for Freiburg, where she studied with Edmund Husserl, then Heidelberg, where she worked on St Augustine with Karl Jaspers. The entanglement came and went – Heidegger, McCarthy thought, was 'the great love thing' for Arendt – for the rest of their lives.

Arendt was horrified, obviously, when Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and obeyed the decrees past sacking his non-Aryan colleagues. She cut all contact for many years. But information technology seems that she picked up with him once more in 1949, on her get-go trip back to Federal republic of germany afterward the Nazis had been defeated, and that she felt almost sorry for him, on account of the poverty of his ideals and political judgment: 'In one case upon a time there was a fox who was so lacking in slyness he not merely kept getting caught in traps but couldn't even tell the difference between a trap and a non-trap … He hit on an idea completely new and unheard-of among foxes. He built a trap as his burrow.' Her own more phenomenological writings –The Homo Condition; the 'exercises … inhow to call back' inBetween By and Future – supersede the heroic struggle with existence with worlds that are shared and human, inhabited by 'Men' and with human-made space between them. The accent she put in her own piece of work on what she called 'natality', new beginnings, must exist intended at least partly to give the finger to Heidegger and his fascination with Being-towards-Death.

In 1929, Arendt took upwards with Günther Stern, a immature German language-Jewish author-intellectual. One reason she married him was that her mother liked him, another was that she liked his female parent. Stern was working on his Habilitationschrift in Frankfurt, though his progress was blocked by Theodor Adorno. (This was ane reason for Arendt's lifelong loathing of 'Teddy', another being his use of his mother's Italian and non-Jewish surname instead of his father'due south, which was Wiesengrund. 'Infamy', in Arendt's view: an 'unsuccessful attempt at co-performance'.) She, meanwhile, institute funding to start researching German Romanticism, a project that became the remarkableRahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, largely finished by 1938, then lost, and finally published just in 1957.

Rahel Varnhagen (née Levin) never published a book herself – how could she have done, being Jewish, and a woman, in the Berlin of the early 19th century? But she read Goethe, and wrote thousands of letters, and in her attic salon hosted conversations between great poets, mighty diplomats and mere nobodies such as herself, during 'the age of Frederick Ii, in which Jews could live, which gave room for every found in his sun-welcoming land'. But and so the World Spirit crashed through Jena, fashions changed, and 'social prejudices were … intensified to the bespeak of crass, brutal exclusion'. In 1814, she married Karl August Varnhagen, a Prussian diplomat, and converted to Christianity: '19th-century Jews, if they wanted to play a part in lodge, had no pick but to become parvenus par excellence.' Rahel, however, turned out to exist too sensitive, also thoughtful, besides fine a person really, to be an entirely successful social climber, and on her deathbed embraced Jewishness – 'the thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame' – equally an experience 'I should on no account at present wish to have missed'. Varnhagen, Luxemburg and Arendt form Gillian Rose'southward central trio of outsider women thinkers inThe Broken Middle (1992), excluded from all clubs by ethnicity and gender, but who learned to employ that exclusion every bit a 'coign of vantage, in messages equally in life'. 'It was,' as Arendt put it, 'the very loophole through which the pariah, precisely because he is an outcast, tin meet life as a whole.'

By​ 1956, when Arendt was tidying her Rahel book for publication, the 'physical annihilation' which ended the history of the Jews in Federal republic of germany was known to all. Even in the early on 1930s, however, Arendt felt she had some 'awareness of the doom of German Judaism'. When the Reichstag burned in 1933, she immediately felt 'responsible', and was 'no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander'. Stern fled to Paris, simply she stayed in Berlin with her female parent, hiding communists and doing research for the Zionists in the Prussian Land Library. I day later in 1933 she was arrested by an inexperienced Gestapo man. She was detained for several days, but she buttered him upward and he allow her go. Hannah and Martha left Frg the adjacent 24-hour interval, travelling via Prague and Geneva to Paris. Arendt remained in Paris until 1940, working for a series of Zionist organisations that supported Jewish refugees from Nazism and prepared them for settlement in Palestine. She and Stern divorced in 1937.

Arendt had met Benjamin in Berlin – he was a distant cousin of Stern's. But she got to know him much better in Paris through refugee networks, which was also the way she met Blücher, a non-Jewish one-time Spartacist and sexual activity-lodge bouncer, whom she married in January 1940. In September 1939, Blücher and Benjamin were interned together at Nevers, though Blücher was released early, but to be interned again a few months later. This time the order included women. On 15 May 1940 Arendt showed up at the Vélodrome d'Hiver, near the Eiffel Tower, to exist transported later on a week to the camp at Gurs. She'd been in that location for v weeks when France fell to the Nazis, bailiwick collapsed, and she just walked out. 'Past hazard,' she later wrote to Gershom Scholem, she ran into Benjamin at Lourdes, where he was waiting for visa papers, and spent 'a few weeks' with him, playing chess, before leaving for Montauban, where she was reunited with her husband. Arendt and Blücher terminal saw Benjamin in Marseilles on xix September 1940, when he gave them a suitcase of papers to look after. Six days later he killed himself at Portbou on the Spanish border.

Arendt and Blücher left France for Lisbon early on in 1941, then in May boarded the SSGuiné for New York. They opened Benjamin'due south suitcase and entertained their beau passengers by reading the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' out loud: the homunculus in the chess set, the storm from paradise, the 'state of emergency' that is simply the normal status of the oppressed. After processing on Ellis Island they institute two furnished rooms to rent on Due west 95th Street, which they shared with Arendt's mother when she arrived a few weeks later on.

All three of them were well past the historic period at which it's easy to choice upwardly new languages: only they had to, and they did. Arendt spent six weeks working as an au pair with a vegetarian family in Massachusetts and was thinking of training as a social worker until Blücher nixed it: 'Just a dervish or a gifted imbecile could survive that kind of study.' Blücher struggled terribly with English. Young-Bruehl quotes pages of cheesy idioms from his notebooks: 'amused to death', 'hit the jackpot', 'make a mess of information technology', 'nifty chick'. Arendt too relished a flavourful saying, a habit McCarthy tried in future years to correct: horned dilemmas, spades called spades, willy-nilly and pell-mell. Immature-Bruehl, who studied with Arendt at the New School in the 1970s, remembers her as especially fond of 'when the fries are downwards', pronounced 'cheeps'; when McCarthy edited the posthumousLife of the Mind for publication, she altered this to 'when the stakes are on the tabular array'. The cheeps get the last laugh, however, in Benjamin'due south 13th thesis, included in Harry Zohn's translation ofIlluminations, edited by Arendt in the late 1960s. 'Wenn es hart auf hart kommt', Benjamin wrote in German language, often translated as 'when it comes to the crunch'. Zohn and Arendt requite usa: 'Nevertheless, when the chips are down'.

Arendt found her feet in New York much more than quickly than Blücher. One job she got was to research the whereabouts of lost and ruined Jewish artefacts – a position that allowed her to 'mourn through action', in the words of a friend. Some other was for Schocken, the Jewish émigré publisher, bringing editions of Kafka, Scholem, Bernard Lazare to the American market. And she wrote polemical essay-columns, in High german at first, for the German-speaking New York Jewish press, and so in the spirited, sardonic English of a beer-hall fiddler who hasn't forgotten her erstwhile life in the string quartet: 'Evidently nobody wants to know that gimmicky history has created a new kind of human beings – the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends,' she wrote in one small, harsh masterpiece, 'We Refugees' (1943). 'There are those odd optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go dwelling and plow on the gas or brand use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected fashion.'

By 1945 Arendt was talking to publishers about the book that would appear in 1951 asThe Origins of Totalitarianism. 'Our book', she called it in private with Blücher, who did a lot of the reading for her in the New York Public Library while she was at work and Martha was doing the cooking and cleaning. 'Without premonition and probably against their witting inclinations, they had come to establish willy-nilly a public realm,' Arendt later wrote about the previously unpolitical French intellectuals who were of a sudden 'sucked' into the Resistance when their regime capitulated to the Nazis. Individuals using their 'initiative' and working together to build open debate and freedom: that, to Arendt, was a 'treasure' that 'appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different mysterious conditions, equally though it were a fata morgana'. Arendt and Blücher built something like this between them inThe Origins of Totalitarianism in particular, 'an epic piece of work', as Loma says, crammed with historical takes and angles, $.25 and bobs about Disraeli and Dreyfus, Rhodes and Kipling and other gamers of 'the dandy game of incalculable enormousness', all squashed together because you never know which bit yous're going to need and when.

The Origins of Totalitarianism changed shape and thrust many times over the years of its composition. The kickoff plan, Hill explains, was for a book called 'The Elements of Shame: Antisemitism – Imperialism – Racism'. That shifted to 'The Iii Pillars of Hell', with sections entitled 'The Jewish Route to the Tempest-Centre of Politics', 'The Disintegration of the National Country', 'Expansion and Race', 'Total-Fledged Imperialism'. The changes in scale and approach presumably had a lot to do with the stop-outset nature of work on the volume, but as Arendt went on, the ways she slotted her fragments together became a method of organisation in its own right: 'Elements past themselves probably never crusade annihilation. They become origins of events if and when they crystallise into fixed and definite forms. Then and simply then tin we trace their history backwards. The event illuminates its ain past merely can never be deduced from information technology.'

By 1948, the projection had taken on a shape recognisable to readers of the current version, in iii parts, headed 'Antisemitism', 'Imperialism', 'Nazism'. But and then, 'as news of Stalinist tactics emerged and Arendt began to read through materials from the Soviet Matrimony', she decided to revise the concluding section, and what had been tightly focused on Nazi Federal republic of germany began to stretch and spread. The Penguin Modern Classics edition contains a short preface from 1950 that presents the top level of her analysis: two world wars in a generation leading to 'homelessness on an unprecedented calibration, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth', and the likelihood of 'a 3rd world war' any minute; 'the irritating incompatibility' betwixt all the amazing things modern humanity tin can practice and its apparent inability to live in and 'understand the sense of' the world information technology has brought virtually; the desperate need for 'a new political principle' to protect humanity from the 'destructive forces' its own ingenuity and foolishness have unleashed.

Then come three more than prefaces, one for each section of the 1968 edition, along with a final chapter, 'Ideology and Terror', that was start added to the second edition in 1958. The third section is at present nigh totalitarianism in general: masses not classes, conspiratorialism and terror, loyalty to the leader, hugger-mugger police. This function can read like the slightly pulpy, mid-century-mod Common cold War bestseller it kind of was, but information technology'due south also righteously horrific. The 'crunch of the century', Arendt thinks, has at its storm center the problem of superfluousness, the millions and millions of people abandoned past modernity and its cruel accelerations. This is a political, non a populationist, statement. It's almost the way mod governments sort between the people they have a use for and the much larger number they don't: 'utilitarian' is one term Arendt uses of this process and 'radical evil' is some other. 'Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come whenever it seems impossible to convalesce political, social or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.'

The Origins of Totalitarianism is such a massive book, then dumbo so disorganised, that Canovan's idea of approaching it like a grouping of islands is good. Each reader needs to discover her own road through information technology, and I like to split the trip in two. 'Antisemitism' and 'Imperialism' together form a brilliant historical business relationship of the way the development and disintegration of the 19th-century European nation-state gave nascence to ii 'new kinds of human being existence', 'cousins-germane' in more than ways than one: the refugee outside the border, the national minority within. At the same fourth dimension, the colonial search for new ways to make profit shrank the globe and brought fantasies most its domination ever closer to reality. Back in Europe, meanwhile, wealth and population, emancipation and enfranchisement, were increasing unevenly and often explosively breaking old habits and institutions, and leading to outpourings of nastiness against vulnerable minorities, no matter that members of these minorities might exist assimilated and rich. Thus the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, where totalitarianism took off, Arendt thinks, considering information technology looked like it really did offer a 1-stop solution to all the problems of the time.

I would linger a chip longer on the final affiliate of the 'Imperialism' section, which tells the sorry story of the Rights of Man since they were first declared in 1789; in Arendt's view they take never and nowhere been properly enforced. The thought of universal human rights has, she thinks, always been muddled upward with nationalism, the wars and revolutions of modern Europe like a gigantic game of musical chairs. When the music stops and borders become fixed once again, the lucky people find themselves in nation-states that want them and have the wherewithal to expect later on them. The unlucky ones, on either side of the edge, find their inalienable rights as human beings of no employ to them at all.

The League of Nations? That really proved itself, didn't it, in the years between the wars. The Un, with its Declaration of Man Rights in 1948? Arendt mentions information technology once, in a footnote, to say that it convened a 'mere gesture' of a briefing in the early 1950s 'with the explicit reassurance that participation … would entail no obligations whatsoever'. The conception of human rights, 'based upon the assumed being of a homo being as such, bankrupt down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships, except that they were notwithstanding homo' – as had happened with the Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Then, the postwar 'solution of the Jewish question … namely, by ways of a colonised and and so conquered territory', succeeded just by producing 'a new category of refugees, the Arabs'. And so the game goes on.

'At the same moment that exile flourished every bit a cultural and literary trope in the Cold War W,' Stonebridge wrote inPlaceless People (2018), 'the rightless (who kept on coming) receded into the mist of a humanism attempting to reinvent some kind of moral authority for the European tradition even as its geopolitical power wilted.' The reinvented moral authority, in recent years, has not been going well.

The second half of my isle-hopping would pursue a route through the 3rd department, understanding totalitarianism equally a terrible answer to the perfectly sensible question Arendt puts at the finish. How might ane go almost resolving 'the crisis of the century', be that century the 20th or the 21st? The history her argument traces is an infernal version ofPilgrim's Progress, through terror, camps, pits and holes of oblivion, before petering out at a cliff border: 'Information technology may even exist that the truthful predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form – though not necessarily the cruellest – simply when totalitarianism has become a matter of the by.' The 'crunch of the century' may eventually burn through the totalitarian germination to be replaced past something else.

InThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), Shoshana Zuboff writes that she was 'haunted' for decades by Arendt's remarks most totalitarianism being the curse of the 20thcentury 'only considering it so terrifyingly took care of its problems': loneliness, superfluity, the collapsing of institutions and the sense they gave their members of purpose and connectedness. I can't imagine why she'd be thinking almost Facebook and Google here. 'Instrumentarianism' is what Zuboff calls the stealthier sort of total domination she sees as characteristic of surveillance commercialism: her argument would be clearer – and her book blessedly shorter – if she'd put in a pinch more Marx and Foucault, but I can't deny the chill I become from the way she uses Arendt.

In Arendt's volume, terror, camps and torture enable domination by destroying spontaneity, reducing 'the human specimen' to a 'bundle of reactions that tin always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that deport in exactly the same way'. Zuboff's instrumentarianism is gentler and more entertaining, but information technology eats away at the possibility of human freedom from inside. B.F. Skinner, Zuboff writes, did non alive to encounter the real power of his techniques for behavioural modification actuated in humans, via phones and networks, at enormous scale. 'The problem with mod theories of behaviourism,' Arendt wrote in the 1950s, 'is not that they are wrong merely that they could become true … it is quite conceivable that the modern age – which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human being action – may end in the deadliest, well-nigh sterile passivity history has ever known.'

The​ political theory line onThe Origins of Totalitarianism is that it is, as Canovan puts information technology, 'lopsided'. The 'Antisemitism' and 'Imperialism' parts are adequately solid, but the subsequent deduction of 'an entirely new form of authorities' might too be fiction, for all the evidence and method there is in its structure. Which is true enough, as far as it goes, though I think y'all tin acquire more than past going with Arendt. The other big imbalance is the hundreds of pages about racism and antisemitism and the 'subterranean stream' of the cranky and the resentful, only zilch about socialism utopian or scientific, Marx or Lenin or the movements to which they gave their names. Marx, Arendt was in no doubt, was 'a nifty scholar' with 'a passion for justice'; yet information technology was, she felt, also clear that Marxism led to immiseration and gulags. How much was it down to Marx that socialism in the Soviet Union had gone so dreadfully incorrect?

Arendt planned to deal with this question in a 'niggling written report of Marx' to be split into three sections. The first would look at Marx philosophically, equally the inheritor of a tradition of muddled thinking nearly work and labour stretching back at least to Plato. The second would be a history of Marxism from Marx to Lenin, Lenin to Stalin, and the piece of work she did towards the third became the 'Credo and Terror' annex toThe Origins of Totalitarianism. Simply the study was never finished. The more Arendt explored Marx's place in the wider tradition of Western philosophy, the more the difficulties spread. The study grew into the sections 'Labour' and 'Piece of work' inThe Man Condition (1958), the first and best ii essays inBetween By and Futurity (1961), the anti-'social question' strand inOn Revolution and a enshroud of drafts and lectures, in English and German language, that remained unpublished until afterward her death. These were published in 2018 equallyThe Modern Claiming to Tradition, Vol. VI of Wallstein's edition in progress of Arendt'south complete works, and it was Canovan'south discovery of these papers in the archives in the 1980s that led her to change her mind virtually the overall management of Arendt's idea.

'It has become fashionable,' Arendt wrote in a 1953 manuscript, 'to assume an unbroken line between Marx and Lenin and Stalin, thereby accusing Marx of existence the father of totalitarian domination,' but actually this is wrong. 'I think information technology could be shown that the line from Aristotle to Marx shows both fewer and far less decisive breaks than the line from Marx to Stalin.' It follows, then, that if y'all're going to blame the 'monstrosity' of Stalin on philosophical influences, you can't blame Marx in isolation: you need to take on the entirety of 'our own tradition', including 'those real questions and perplexities' within it that Marx had to struggle with himself.

One problem was the philosopher-king idea that the vita contemplativa, equally Arendt called information technology, led to better politics than the vita activa. Some other was the view of history as a human being artefact, followed by the unsurprising discovery of pattern in that artefact: 'Class struggle – to Marx this formula seemed to unlock all the secrets of history, just as the law of gravity had appeared to unlock all the secrets of nature.' The biggest of Marx'due south 'perplexities', withal, were the confused ideas about piece of work and labour he had inherited from the philosopher kings before him, merely which became a detail problem for his thinking, given the explosive growth and changes both activities were undergoing. 'It is equally though Marx … tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools.' He was far from the merely writer in his time to come up upwardly against this: the 'modern age in full general', Arendt writes, found itself 'overwhelmed … by the unprecedented actual productivity of Western mankind'. All this new wealth of a sudden, all produced by human labour, but robbed from the labourers to make others rich: the injustice fabricated Marx furious, and the fury led him to a series of 'fundamental and flagrant contradictions', the biggest of which is the one between labour as the activity that makes humans human and labour as bondage, the bondage that must be broken so humans tin exist free.

Readers come toThe Human Condition expecting clarity, definition, a argument, perhaps, of Arendt's central principles. Canovan herself approached it this way in her showtime Arendt book, and then gave in and wrote her second, 'a reinterpretation' of Arendt's idea, in which she acknowledges that much of it looks 'bafflingly perverse'. The vocabulary, for instance, is plain, but Arendt 'does not warn her readers before using ordinary terms in special senses' and these special senses have a manner of piling upward: 'She ofttimes tries to say more (and particularly to make more conceptual distinctions) than can be comfortably digested.'

Riffling throughThe Human being Status, you'll run into a corking deal about the Athenianpolis and its distinction from theoikos, and about 'action', which is Arendt's usual rendition of what Aristotle called praxis, and which she defines every bit 'the only action that goes on straight between men without the intermediary of things or matter', and thus 'the political action par excellence'. The emphasis on Athenians has led many to misread the book equally 'an practise in nostalgia', Canovan writes, merely if anything information technology'south the contrary. It begins with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 – an event 'second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom', yet only the latest sally in modernity's 'rebellion confronting human existence as it has been given', something we actually demand to talk about, surely, earlier nosotros're all blown up. Except that we tin't talk near it, because science moves so fast that most people 'will forever exist unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which withal we are able to practise'. There's thus a danger that we are becoming 'thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget that is technically possible, no affair how murderous'. The volume ends with the evocation that disturbed Zuboff, of 'the deadliest' and 'most sterile' passivity the world has ever known.

In between, it'southward true, there are a lot of Greek and Latin terms, simply Arendt is not reviving classical theories so much as prodding and reflecting, examining concepts and their histories, in an urgent search – every bit Canovan sees it – for of import bits that may have been missed out. One missing link is Aristotle'southward distinction betweenzoe andbios:zoebeingness the sort of life you become everywhere in nature, in animals and plants every bit well as people, whereasbios is always human being-shaped, biographical, 'limited … by the 2 supreme events of advent and disappearance within the world'. Another is the work-labour stardom that befuddled Marx. From the time of Aristotle, European languages take maintained 'two etymologically unrelated words for what we have come up to think of as the aforementioned activeness': work and labour,oeuvrer andtravailler,werken andarbeiten,ergazesthai andponein. Happy meanings, to exercise with craft, accomplishment, stability, tend to cluster around one member of each pair, and sad ones, concerning hurting, trouble, waste material, sheer unending graft and repetition, effectually the other. Labour was exhausting, dirty, unending, a constant battle to beat off death and decay, which is the reason the citizen kept slaves at dwelling house, along with the women, to practice it for him: 'The slave'southward deposition was … a fate worse than death.' Piece of work, on the other hand, makes the stuff that constitutes what Arendt calls 'the globe', the coating of 'human artifice' nosotros build over the earth and nature, without which the 'common world' of human culture could non be.

Philosophers, however, always 'disregarded' the work-labour distinction, for reasons Arendt considers 'obvious plenty'. Labour especially was a non-subject, a matter to be kept hidden away in 'the shadowy interior of the household' where women produced children and slaves cleared upward the mess. That was just the style it was; they had zero to compare it to. Christianity, when information technology came along, also kept itself well away from all the nasty, muddied stuff in the privy. And then the confusions multiplied with the centuries, betwixt labour and piece of work and action, the private life and the public; then along came Marx, the offset great scholar really to care that the labour that makes value does so at the expense of the suffering of homo beings.

By Marx's time, however, theoikos had burst out of the household and become economics, 'a nationwide "housekeeping"', 'an unnatural growth … of the natural'; and 'the common world' that 'gathers united states together and however prevents our falling over each other' had succumbed to the entropy of 'mass society'. 'The tragedy of Marx,' Canovan sums up in her second book, 'is that although he aimed at freedom … what he really achieved was to encourage his followers to put themselves at the service of compulsive processes' – behaviourism, automation, totalitarianism even. Or that's what Canovan thinks was Arendt'due south view.

'To read such a volume, past a woman of large spirit and nifty erudition, can be painful,' Adrienne Rich wrote in 1976 ofThe Human Condition, 'because information technology embodies the tragedy of a female listen nourished on male ideologies.' Information technology was obvious to Rich that it'southward women who do most of the work in human being reproduction, and most of the unpaid labour in the abode; and notwithstanding for Arendt 'the withholding of women from participation in … the common world' was something 'from which she does not so much turn her eyes as stare direct through unseeing'. Rich is quite right to read Arendt equally anti-feminist. It's well known that she had no patience with what she saw of Women'south Liberation amongst her students in the 1970s: 'This isnot serious,' 1 of them recalls her maxim, poking at the Chicago Women's Liberation Spousal relationship badge the student was wearing on her lapel.

Rich laments 'the ability of male person credo to possess such a female person heed, to disconnect it, as it were, from the female torso which encloses it and which it encloses'; but that disconnection may open up important new coigns and angles. Jacqueline Rose, for example, finds in Arendt's emphasis on 'the privative trait of privacy' – viciousness in the kitchen! – a suggestive starting point for male fantasies of despotic domination, and hence domestic violence: 'Women become the scapegoats for man'southward unconscious knowledge of his own human, which means shared … frailty.' The strenuousness with which Arendt'south thinking avoided both 'the realm of necessity' – which includes everything to exercise with keeping people alive and preferably thriving – and pity, kindness, grief, 'the darkness of the homo eye', serves as a useful reminder that mortality is fifty-fifty nowadays unmanageable, which may be the reason that the work done by intendance-givers to alleviate pain and humiliation is so often stared straight through unseeing, paid desperately when it is paid at all.

For Jacqueline's sister Gillian, the question was not about male person violence equally such but 'the connectedness between liberalism and fascism' in modern European political history. Rahel, Luxemburg and Arendt 'span iii crises of state and civil club in Prussia and Germany' and are, 'as women and as Jews … peculiarly qualified witnesses of the equivocation of the eye'. As women and as members of a pariah nation, they could encounter the emptiness and mirage at the heart of all the big talk about the rights of homo, and that trying to avert the problem by retreating to 'customs' or 'nation' or 'race' or 'gender' merely repeated it on a dissimilar scale. All the aforementioned, you have to proceed on trying. It'southward a 'tension of middlewomanship', a tillage of 'aporetic universalism' that refuses the cosy collapse into 'any upstanding immediacy of beloved'.

Merely, actually, the reason I started reading Arendt was because of something Donna Haraway wrote inStaying with the Trouble (2016) well-nigh Eichmann and 'the give up of thinking … of the item sort that could make the disaster of the Anthropocene, with its ramped-upward speciecides and genocides, come truthful'. You lot know it's happening and I know it'southward happening: so why do we continue letting it? 'This event is still at stake,' Haraway wrote. 'Think we must; we must think!' I thought Haraway was correct most this, and I thought Arendt might be skilful to think with, 'against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair', as she put it at the beginning ofThe Origins of Totalitarianism.

Arendt added a chapter to that book in 1958 and then removed information technology. In it, she writes about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 as another of those moments, like the nascency of the French Resistance, when scattered groups of people, 'without premonition and probably confronting their conscious inclinations' come together to build 'public happiness', as she sometimes chosen it, or 'public freedom' – the 'treasure' that 'appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again', like theFlying Dutchman. It's something a bit like this 'treasure' that Arendt calls 'natality', the fact of human being birth and the possibility of new ancestry, and I have to say that I don't buy it and always experience a bit embarrassed when Arendt tries to palm it off. Then again, I remember that Naomi Klein used to cite the piece of work of Brad Werner, the geophysicist who in 2012 gave a talk called 'Is Earth Fucked?' in which 'he talked virtually system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations', and concluded that

global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, user-friendly and bulwark-free that 'earth-human systems' are becoming dangerously unstable in response … In that location was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope. Werner termed it 'resistance' – movements of 'people or groups of people … environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant civilisation, equally in protests, blockades and demolition past indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists' … And so it stands to reason that, 'if nosotros're thinking well-nigh the futurity of the globe, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we accept to include resistance every bit part of that dynamics.'

And all the same, 'any period to which its own past has go as questionable equally it has to us must eventually come upwards against the phenomenon of linguistic communication, for in information technology the past is contained ineradicably, thwarting all attempts to go rid of it,' every bit Arendt wrote in her beautiful essay on Benjamin. For as long as nosotros use the word 'politics', she continues, 'the Greekpolis will keep to exist at the lesser of our political existence – that is, at the lesser of the sea.'

brownsomard.blogspot.com

Source: https://tzirkotis.wordpress.com/2021/11/09/we-must-think-from-the-london-review-of-books/

Share this post